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"Martine Pisani doesn?t delve into the spectacular. Think of sans, the irresistible male trio where she did away with artifices of representation through humor and detachment. With slow down she goes even further, developing personal research and questioning the limits of presence, what it means to ?be there? onstage. Absence, effort, concentration, weight, fatigue, speed, elan, idleness? She works with a larger group than usual so that the choreography remains attentive to these signs, which are sometimes quite tenuous, and give off a sense of presence especially by means of facial expressions. "The face as a mediator in the encounter with ?the other?," she points out. "It is always bare, and yet secret, strange, as though absorbed by the inside." Slow down. Prey to clashing drives, the six performers seem to struggle with this directive. They look around, they waver, they brood. The stage is bare, stripped of décor and dramatic progression. The performers take turns disappearing behind a mysterious black panel. They thus each seem to be conveying their own uniqueness while at the same time they come across as replaceable and interchangeable, since only five of them ever appear at a time. In a delicate exercise of reunion, whether the dancers are lining up for a ground-contact improvisation or else humming pop standards in chorus, there is always the same startling funniness, the same up-beat joy." David Bernadas in "Mouvement", Nov 13th 2002 Duration: 65’ choreography: martine pisani, performers: vincent druguet, théo kooijman, eduard mont de palol, élise olhandéguy, laurent pichaud, olivier schram, sound design: olivier renouf, light design and stage management: philippe bouttier, costumes design: michèle paldacci, production management: menu a produced by: La compagnie du solitaire, coproduced by: Octobre en Normandie, Dieppe Scène Nationale, Le Vivat d'Armentières, performance created during a residency at C.C.N. du Havre- Haute- Normandie and at Dieppe Scène Nationale (premiered in october 2002) with help from Direction Régionale des Affaires Culturelles d'Ile de France – Ministère de la Culture et de la Communication, from ADAMI and the French Embassy Photo: Sébastien Dolidon Martine Pisani lives and works in Paris. She started dancing in the 80s and trained in contemporary dance, with, among others, David Gordon, Yvonne Rainer and Odile Duboc. Pisani danced for several years with the company Dunes, Madeleine Chiche and Bernard Misrachi, with whom she also developed pedagogical activities. In 1992 she started her own Compagnie du solitaire and created the pieces fragments tirés du sommeil (trio 30' – 1992), U-Nighted (duo 15’ – 1993), le grand combat (solo 20' – 1993), là où nous sommes (quatuor 30‘ – 1995), l'air d'aller (trio 50’ – 1998), sans (trio 50’ – 2000), ce que je regarde me regarde (duo 26’ – 2001), slow down (sextuor 65' - 2002) Photo: Arnaud Didierlaurent :: program